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Leia woke up. She wasn't woozy or nauseous, and while she wasn't feeling happy, she wasn't feeling down, either, which was surprising, considering she remembered in vivid, embarrassing detail the events of the previous night. She wasn't in her usual sleeping pod, either; she was on the padded bench in what she thought of as the office. Esifwu was nearby, working on something, but looked up almost as soon as Leia woke up. Predictably, she handed Leia something hot to drink and sweet to eat as soon as she sat up, then went back to work while Leia went off to the facilities.
"We gave you something to keep your mood from dropping too low," Esifwu explained while Leia ate her breakfast. "I told you yesterday that I made a mistake that I harmed you by not checking with the ship-mind regarding your home. This morning, I'd like to talk to you, with the ship-mind to help out, about how we can help you."
Leia nodded cautiously.
"We've rescued a lot of people from a lot of different situations. Our goal is to patch them up, feed them, and transport them home, or at least reinsert them into their cultural matrix as quickly as possible. We know from painful experience that we are not good at helping people other than in the short term." Esifwu paused, then continued. "Obviously, we have not been able to find your home. Yet. We are still trying. We do not know when we will find your home, and we can't just make you wait forever, without the people and things you need to live a good life." Esifwu smiled faintly at the shocked look on Leia's face. "The ship-mind has come to some conclusions about your cultural matrix, based on your interactions with it. I want to talk to you about those conclusions. We have no other person from your cultural matrix, and person-minds and other-minds tend to make large mistakes when they only have one example. I need your judgment to know how to find you what you need. Do you understand?" Leia nodded. "I can guarantee that we are going to offend you repeatedly and deeply while we go through these conclusions. If you attack a person, we'll sedate you again, but you will not be punished or blamed."
"Are you serious?" Leia asked.
"Yes. I think I mentioned past painful experience trying to help people." Esifwu grimaced. "Most of the crew are specialists. I'm the generalist. That means I make up my job, and when there isn't something I'm needed for, I do a lot of fetch-and-carry, hold-this-while-I-do-that. But when I am needed, it tends to be very complicated and very important and full of surprises, most of them unpleasant. I did not realize that I should be doing my job around you. I think of you as," Esifwu paused, "a very shy friend. You've been extremely easy to get along with. We did not initially realize how intelligent you are, because we assumed you shared a lot more super-cultural matrix with us. Now that we know you had no experience with even the really simple, ubiquitous technology, we're at a loss to assess you at all, but we think you've been suppressing every emotion and feeling you've had since before Radmer pulled you off the car-crash-sound ship. And last night, something slipped."
Leia started crying. She didn't want to. She didn't mean to. But regardless, she couldn't stop. And this was with who knows what kind of pharmaceutical support in her system. Esifwu scooted over to the bench next to her and slowly put her arms around Leia. When Leia didn't object, she tightened her grip and started rocking. Esifwu didn't say anything, she just held Leia for a long time.
Eventually, either the tears ran down on their own, or the drugs kicked in, or the rocking helped. Or something. But Leia did straighten up and with the assistance of a towel, restored some order to her nose and eyes. Esifwu shifted her chair to the screen and fiddled with it for a while. When she had a parallel display of text, one side in Target Language and the other in English, she beckoned Leia over. "Here's the high-level summary. First, you come from the most tokenized culture we know about."
"Yes. That was clear from what I pried out of ship-mind."
"That must have been a surprise."
"Yes." Huge understatement. The most communistic group back home would still qualify for the most tokenized culture by this group's standards. Really weird. And as tolerant and open-minded as this group was, Leia suspected there'd be some mandatory counseling for most of the free market theorists.
"Second, your cultural matrix is unstable, regardless of the metric chosen."
Leia thought about that for a while, and tabbed down for more detail from the ship-mind. She could see where it had gotten this one: massive technological and social changes, velocity of change in durable goods, value systems changes, political structure changes, and then a long list of stuff that didn't translate well and would probably take her a long time to understand because it wasn't a missing vocabulary problem. It was a completely different way of thinking about things.
"Yes."
"It's got to be hard to find any personal stability within such a matrix."
Leia gave a short, unfunny laugh. "Try impossible."
"How do you think you compared to other people? In terms of kin-networks you could rely upon for support and assistance?"
Leia shrugged. "Better than some, worse than some. I have no recollection of how I got on that ship which means I don't know if I forgot anything from before being grabbed. Assuming I didn't lose much, I'd broken up with Doug, my last boyfriend, about a month before." She stopped, grimaced, and corrected herself. "I was dumped by my last boyfriend. Years before I was dumped by my parents when I decided I wasn't going to stay in their church. I had - have - good friends. But it's hard to build when so much went away all at once. And I'm not a very sociable person. And between jobs and kids, everyone's busy."
Esifwu cocked her head. "Have you been trying to convince yourself that you should be happy you aren't there anymore?"
Leia's jaw dropped.
Esifwu held her hands up. "You would not be the first. You were grabbed by total strangers with no connection to you, your culture, anything. Some people are grabbed as part of a kinship struggle. A lot of them try to rationalize not going back, but that's not a great solution. If you've already had to move from one subculture within your matrix to another, you know how hard this is."
Leia thought about that for a while, then nodded. She tended to think it was a flaw in herself that she had a tough time moving on from her past, but Esifwu was just saying what her friends kept trying to tell her.
Esifwu continued, "The ship-mind thinks there's a big problem that's relatively easy to fix, and that is explaining to you, and convincing you, that you can ask for things and get them and you do not need to worry about negative consequences. The ship-mind believes you are worried about not having tokens and therefore cannot ask for what you need. Do you agree with the ship-mind?"
"Yes!" Once articulated, Leia could understand how ludicrous this was given what she had learned over the last few days.
"Does that mean that's fixed?"
"Yes. No. I cannot change the way I think that quickly, but I can make an effort."
"Good. You and the ship-mind are already working through the language and cultural barrier problems faster than anyone would have thought possible, particularly since no one noticed we were in a first-contact situation until yesterday." Esifwu grimaced. "Again, I apologize. We all apologize."
Esifwu and Leia looked at each other for a moment, and then Leia nodded her head, once.
"Want to go have lunch in the mess or are you going to hole up here in front the screen again?" asked Esifwu.
"Lunch sounds good. I didn't know people met for anything other than dinner."
Esifwu put her head down in her hands for a moment, then straightened back up and said, "I'm going to keep making wrong assumptions. I'll keep apologizing. I'm very glad you are so patient."
Leia laughed. "And I have so much choice!"
"Yes you do," responded Esifwu, utterly serious.
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Copyright Rebecca Allen, 2012.
Created: July 9, 2012 Updated: July 9, 2012